


do anything, go anywhere

by Beans (provetheworst)



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Post-War, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-22 09:20:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22713751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/provetheworst/pseuds/Beans
Summary: Linhardt and Caspar decide what to do after the war is over.
Relationships: Caspar von Bergliez/Linhardt von Hevring
Comments: 9
Kudos: 72
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 5





	do anything, go anywhere

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Marks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marks/gifts).



“This is gonna sound super weird, but I wish the war wasn’t over.” Caspar puts his hands behind his head, staring up at the sky. The streets of Enbarr are lively with people still excited from the parade a few hours ago, hustling either to or from the festival that’s sprawled out across half the squares in town; the sky is blue, threaded with thin, wispy clouds. 

Linhardt, half-asleep, squints at him. “No you don’t.”

“Yes, I do!” Caspar clenches his fists, then relaxes, laughing at himself. “No, you’re right, but I mean more - we’ve gotta go home after this. I’m going to miss spending so much time with you. And everybody! And everybody.”

Linhardt considers this for a moment. “You don’t _have_ to go home.”

“Yeah, I do,” Caspar says. “Where else am I going to go? I can’t just hang around the Hevring estates all day. And if there’s not a war on, how am I going to keep making my name as a fighter? Ugh. I’m gonna end up a _teacher_ or something if I’m not careful. It’s going to be so boring.”

“I don’t think there’s any risk of that,” Linhardt assures him, patting him on the shoulder. They wander down a narrow residential street, between narrow old stone houses two and three stories high, packed tight together. Laundry dries on lines up above them, crisscrossing the sky like celebratory pennants. A few homes _have_ hung up pennants. “So why do you _have_ to go home?”

“Because!” Caspar pauses. “Because? I don’t know. I guess I could just not. Oh, no, oh no.” He stops in his tracks, face in his hands. “Lin, what am I going to _do_? I don’t actually want to go home! I just realized that! I never thought about this part!”

“Not even once?”

“Not even once!”

“It’s fine.” Linhardt reaches out to pat him on the shoulder, but stops himself, hand sort of hanging in midair. Then he goes ahead and does it anyway. Caspar doesn’t notice the hesitation. “I don’t plan on going home, myself.”

“Where are you going?”

Linhardt shrugs. “I’ll find somewhere. I’ve got research I want to do. Maybe not Crests. I’ve had enough blood.”

“So go somewhere without blood.”

Linhardt stares at him.

“What?”

“That sounds terrifying.”

“A place without - _ooh_ ,” Caspar says. “Yeah, pretty much anything alive has blood, doesn’t it? So if there’s _no_ blood, then it’s all ghosts.”

Linhardt sighs deeply. “Or there’s nothing alive there at all.”

“So, all ghosts. Like I said.” Caspar pauses. “Okay, I’m getting why you wouldn’t want to do that, that’s fine, that makes sense. That’s cool. So somewhere _with_ blood, which, now that I say it? Also sounds bad. I’m going to stop making suggestions now.”

“Thank you.”

Caspar beams at him, and Linhardt has no choice but to look away. “Any time.”

The trouble with Caspar smiling is - Linhardt’s always liked to see it. He always wants Caspar to smile, but also, somewhere along the line - all the way back to when they were at the Academy together, if not a little before - actually seeing that smile turned full force on him started making him feel weird, which made him do the barest amount of research (read: asking Sylvain, of all people, because Linhardt already had a pretty good idea what was going on). He’s been nursing a crush for a minimum of five years and has, somehow, not run away from the problem yet.

Sometimes he’ll withdraw a little, or take a nap when the intensity of Caspar’s friendship is a bit too much and makes Linhardt want to kiss him at weird times, but he is dealing with it surprisingly well. For all that Linhardt tries to run from and avoid thinking about all of his problems - this is the one that, even if he won’t confront it head on, he has yet to run from. 

Somehow, the idea of making Caspar sad - or even the potential of it - is enough to keep him from running from his problem, just this once. Still: he can’t quite bear the full force of Caspar’s smile full on like this.

Also: he thinks Caspar’s tendency toward rushing into things has started to rub off on him, because he says, without entirely meaning to, “So if I don’t have anywhere I want to be, and you don’t have anywhere you want to be, how about we go nowhere together?”

It takes Caspar a moment to say, “What, like travel around?” There’s music and laughter off in the distance, the whole city noisy with life even if this one street is quiet.

“That’s what I was planning to do,” Linhardt says, nodding.

“Okay. Okay! Yeah, that sounds - I didn’t want to be anywhere you weren’t, honestly,” Caspar says. “I think that’s what was giving me so much trouble. But if I don’t have to figure out where to go _and_ you’re there? That’s perfect! Awesome. Oh, this is going to be great. We can go - anywhere. I wanna see Derdriu when it’s not, you know, all … warred up.”

“Was that really your first time in Derdriu?”

Caspar shrugs. “I mean, yeah? I think I visited once when I was really little, but I don’t remember, so it doesn’t count. Where do you wanna go? We can’t just go to Derdriu and call it a day.”

“Yes, we could,” Linhardt says. Caspar puffs up like he’s about to disagree, so Linhardt carries on before Caspar can actually interrupt. “But I want to visit Almyra. Which is easy, if we’re already visiting Derdriu. We’d be headed the right direction. All we’d need to do is get on a boat.”

“Sailing!” Caspar pumps his fist. “Okay, yeah, it’s a deal. We’ll go to Derdriu and, uh, all of Almyra. The whole country?”

“Sure, the whole country,” Linhardt says.

“And anywhere else we feel like on the way,” Caspar says, trailing his hand along the stone walls of the houses they’re walking by. They finally emerge into a square, packed with booths and garlands of flowers and people talking and eating and dancing. A little group of musicians is playing jaunty, cheerful music. “Hey, you wanna dance?”

“Have I ever, in my life, wanted to dance?”

“I don’t know. How could I know that?” Caspar squints at him, frowning, then grabs Linhardt anyway, wobbling to and fro in something that only dimly resembles the formal dancing of their noble upbringings. “I don’t know how to dance like everyone here’s dancing. But c’mon!”

“I don’t know if there are actually rules to it,” Linhardt says, surveying the crowd instead of looking directly down at Caspar, who is holding on to him intently. “I think you just - move. However you want.”

“So, like us!”

“Sure?”

“We’re going wherever we want. We can do _anything_ ,” Caspar says, all breathless excitement, eyes gleaming bright as the sky. 

“We can,” Linhardt agrees. Earlier, he couldn’t quite bear to look at Caspar. Now he can’t stand to look away. He finds himself making a vague attempt at doing something similar to dancing. It’s not like there are rules to this. He could, if he wanted, try and make a more complete study of what the people around them are up to, but that seems tiring, and Caspar sure isn’t going to bother doing anything like that. So - he might as well just do whatever he wants. As Caspar says, they can do anything.


End file.
